


Unfearing

by Innocentfighter



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Green Lantern (Comics), Green Lantern - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Temporary Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Hal Jordan as parallax, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-19
Updated: 2017-06-19
Packaged: 2018-11-15 22:14:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11240343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innocentfighter/pseuds/Innocentfighter
Summary: Hal Jordan didn't feel fear, so he didn't understand why people felt fear.





	Unfearing

**Author's Note:**

> So here we have a blend of questionable comic book lore knowledge. I mean I know Hal Jordan, but the rest is *shaky hand gesture* and I haven't read the actual Zero Hour comics in a long time so I'm going off what I remember and online synopses. Also, I reread rebirth and I wanted to do something for him. So please enjoy!

_ Hal had never been afraid. _

When he was four, there had been an earthquake. The whole earth had pitched his mom had brought him and his brothers under the table. Jack, who was five nearing six was ash gray and his eyes were wide, he didn’t say anything by he was terrified. Jim who had just turned three was crying in their mother's shoulder, begging her to make the shaking stop. Hal on the other hand was on his hands and knees waiting for the pitching to stop so he could go back to playing.

Once the quake had passed and it was deemed safe by their mother, the boys were able to go back to their activities. Jim clung to their mother’s shirt and Jack hung around her skirt. Hal only pouted because he had been playing with Jack before the quake. So instead he climbed up on the sofa and looked at the pitching waves of the sea.

He wasn’t so sure why his brother’s were affected.

_ His mother called him her “brave boy.” _

Each of the Jordan kids had their own nicknames. Jack was “genius son” and Jim was “handsome man”. It wasn’t to say that the other’s weren’t handsome or smart, but to say what trait they showed most frequently. Dad had told him that the reason he was called “brave boy” was because he was a fighter, he’d been born too early and the doctors thought that he wouldn’t make it.

Hal liked to think it was because he had never ran to his parent’s room crying about the monsters in his closet. They were there, but if he should them that he was afraid, they would never leave.

_ He’d never known fear. _

When he was eight his father took him to a flight demonstration. It was important, Hal had guessed because of the way his father had been preparing for it. The plane had been checked over a lot, his father had told him, and even though Hal had usually been allowed to sit in the pilot’s seat before, this time he couldn’t even touch the outside.

The show had gone on as expected, until the man next to him, the one with the annoying girl, started shifting. In Hal’s experience, that always meant the adult was nervous. So he got nervous too, and stared after his father’s plane. It was leveling out after a loop and suddenly it wasn’t a plane but a ball of smoke.

It cleared and the plane was heading towards the ground. Adults were yelling now, but Hal could only clutch his father’s jacket tighter and watch as the plane didn’t pull up from the nose dive. To this day he swore he saw his father’s eyes meet his, Hal was sure that his dad hadn’t been afraid, just calm.

There was no way anyone could’ve survived the crash. After they tamed the fireball, many people came crowding around him. They told him he was in shock and that he must be terrified. He wanted to say that he wasn’t scared. It’d been his worse fear, on some level he thought, so what was left to be afraid of?

After the accident, Jack developed a fear of heights and Jim wouldn’t look at a plane without crying. Hal missed his dad, and he cried because his dad was gone. He wasn’t detached from his father’s death like his grandma had worried about, but that he just didn’t understand why they thought he had to be  _ more  _ affected by it. Accidents happen, it was the risk of the job.

_ He never reacted to fear by fleeing. _

At twelve all of his friends had started getting into horror movies, so Hal watched them as well. What he didn’t understand is why his friends would jump and hide when the killer came into view and killed another victim. Sure he reacted to the jump scares, twitching when it was suddenly loud or the hallway was no longer empty but he didn’t have nightmares after that. Nor did he have to walk home with a flashlight like some of his friends did, keeping all of the shadows at bay. Hal hadn’t even thought of calling his mom to pick him up.

Jack had written off the movies as lame and boring while Jim watched them with rapt attention and seemed to like the thrill the scares gave him. The fad didn’t last long with Hal, they just weren’t scary.

_ There was never a challenge he was nervous about facing. Failure didn’t make him back away. _

There had been a cliff back in Coast City, the local rumor was that in the fifties a couple of teens had died from jumping off of it. That they had landed on the rocks and impaled themselves. Hal had never found any records of it, but it was always fun to tease Jim when they walked by it on their family beach days.

When he was sixteen, there had been a kid a year old than him, one of Jack’s friends, that always said that “Harold Jordan is only acting like he’s tough.” Most of the time Hal rose to the bait and ended up doing stupid shit that got him in trouble at home or at school. Jack never once said that the other boy was instigating it, which made Hal think that his brother just wanted to see him knocked down a peg.

So one day it escalated, and the kid said that Hal was too chicken to jump off of the cliff. It was a stupid thing to say, because  _ no one  _ would fault anyone for not wanting to jump of a potentially fatal cliff. Hal of course couldn’t let the insult stand, he wasn’t too chicken to do anything!

He told the entire lunchroom that he was going to jump friday after school. Only so that if something did happen, he would have a weekend to heal. The student body ooh’ed and most of them showed up that afternoon. Hal showed up in swim shorts and an old Ferris Air shirt.

Jack looked like he was going to have an aneurysm for how red his face was.

“You’re going to get yourself killed, and mom is going to have to deal with losing another one of her family and Jim’s going to have to deal with losing a brother.”

Hal had only raised an eyebrow, “so? You’ll be happy to see me go.”

That had shut Jack up, and Hal knew that was a low blow that they were going to have to handle at a later time and date.

He made sure to catch the bully’s eyes, and once he did Hal flipped his head up and walked to the edge. Peering below he saw the churning water and semi-sharp rocks.

Since he had an excellent head for heights, he back up a few steps and ran. He flipped off the cliff and angled himself into a dive position. Once he hit the water he wasn’t entirely sure of what happened.

The waves slammed him against the cliff wall and the chill stole his breath. Most people would’ve been paralyzed with fear, but Hal shook his head, tried to get air back into his lungs and swam to the nearest point on the shore.

Only once he was dragging himself onto the shore did he realize the purple blooming across his chest from his hip to the pectoral. Blood leaked lazily out of several cuts on his body. Jack was sprinting towards him.

At the hospital they found out he had two fractured ribs and a fractured hip. Jack told the hospital that it was a hit and run, Hal never loved him more than in that moment.

_ Things that happened in the past never kept him from living in the present. _

The sky was still mostly pink on the dawn of his eighteenth birthday. Hal was standing outside of the air force recruitment office, even before it had opened. Last night’s argument hadn’t deterred him in the least.

His mother had begged him not to do it, crying “think about what happened to your father!” He had responded that the accident was a fluke, he would be fine.

Jack had been eerily silent before leaving the house completely.

But Jim’s tactic was to corner Hal in his room. Sit down on the bed across from him, and look him deep in the eyes. Telling him of statistics and what would happened to him. The parting blow had been, “your death would tear this family apart. You’re our rock!”

That’s why he had slipped out before they could go round two and why the moment he had his signing bonus he would put it on a down payment at the apartment right down the street from Ferris Air’s airfield.

His family’s fear never made sense to him.

_ People had never intimidated him. _

Carol Ferris had the air of a woman who knew what she wanted and and knew that she could get it. Any man that was luck enough to land her would have to deal with her hurricane personality.

Hal loved it, where people had stayed away from Carol because she was powerful and scary in her own way he was attracted to her. She wouldn’t cave easily or let herself be driven by fear.

It only backfired when Hal realized that they wanted different things. Maybe at some point he could’ve settled down with her, had a few kids of his own. But the ring came and he answered its call with an emphatic “absolutely.”

(Needless to say Batman never had much hold on him, he respected what the Dark Knight was doing and trusted that he was right, but the whole fear thing never stopped him from viewing Batman as just a man).

_ He leapt at opportunities that made other people back away. _

Hal became an Emerald Knight, a warrior without fear. It proved to everyone else what he had already known, he was a man without fear. Now they couldn’t dispute it as being egotistical.

Barry had always called it stupid and that it threatened his longevity, but he never once teased Hal about being afraid. Even Oliver, who was known for being reckless had nothing on Hal’s fearlessness.

Other heroes looked to him as a guide and he rose through the ranks of the Green Lantern Corp. He became their greatest, because he had never known the full extent of fear.

_ Anyone would’ve been devastated at the lost of their entire city. _

It was sorrow and rage. Hal hadn’t known what to use to fuel his fight. He settled on rage, it kept his head clear of everything else but one thought, and that was taking out the villain before he could do that to someone else’s town.

He didn’t believe in vengeance. It wasn’t in him to strike out against a hurt to cause more hurt. Another reason why he and the Bat never got along, his crusade started as vengeance and then morphed into justice. Hal couldn’t even think of getting even. It was just stopping the cycle.

When the fight was over and there was nothing else to direct his attention he crumpled to the ground, holding a doll that was the only proof that there had been a city there.

_ For the first time in his life, he didn’t know who he was or what he should do. _

So he went back to familiarity. Grieved by recreating his city. He couldn’t create the life, even in his pain he couldn’t  _ knowingly  _ go against the corp. But he had, and they came for him.

He panicked and unknowingly sealed his own fate as yellow crept into his vision. It was like being a passenger in his own body. While the actions weren’t by his own will (and wasn’t that funny the greatest Lantern lost in a battle of will, did he  _ really  _ deserve that title?) they were by his hand.

It was almost too easy to turn his back on his way of life for so long. He slaughtered his fellow lanterns, rampaged on Oa. Killing Sinestro broke him, that had been the last real attachment to his former life.

He didn’t give up, but he stopped fighting. Fear had won, he was too cowardly to face what his actions as parallax had done. So he let himself become the bad guy, fight those he called friends. Something dark took over, urging him to remake the universe.

The echoes of  _ you’re too weak  _ and  _ what can you do anymore  _ and  _ they won’t forgive you  _ bounced around his head. It crushed whatever else was in his will and he really did become the passenger.

He never thought that it would go as far as it did. When Oliver, of all people, looked at him with fear and shot him in the heart with an arrow. Hal knew that this had gone on long enough. The shadow of what he had become needed to be gone.

So he took the opportunity the moment that he could. Will surged in him one last time, and he pushed back whatever had possessed him. Enough that he could relight the sun.

Which he did but it cost him his life.

_ The following years he was plagued with doubts and fears, cries for vengeance. _

He grew to understand why Jack and Jim were afraid of the earthquake. Why they were wary around what took their father from them. It was clear why people feared the shadows. What kept people from enjoy the thrill of dangerous stunts.

Hal understood fear and doubt now. But he also learned about vengeance. Why people sought out their parents murderer or why people lashed out at the ones that hurt them. What was so satisfying about it.

Spectre and Parallax taught him why people felt like that. The reasoning and motivation behind it. He’d been plagued with doubts, small doubts for years. He was sure it was Parallax’s doing. But he never felt that cold terror people claim. Nor did he feel that burning desire for revenge that some did.

_ He only understood it. _

Things got muddled when he was a soul holding two entities of things he’d only come to know in the time that he’d been trapped with them. They pulled him every which way and it was all he could do to not give into any side of him.

The others, they looked at him with distrust. Those that knew he was back. Most heroes ignored the rumors. They didn’t want to think that he was back. That what he did could be done again.

In a way, that Kyle kid was lucky to know what it was like to feel fear. He could fight against it. Most of the other Lanterns learned to fight against that natural feeling too. But Hal, he hadn’t known the feeling, maybe he was too young when his worst fear happened. Parallax found that easy to corrupt.

However, once that ring wrapped around his finger, once both Spectre and Parallax were fully driven from his soul, Hal stopped feeling doubt and vengeance. He knew that he couldn’t fall again. His will was too strong to let, doubt and fear take over again. Spectre wouldn’t save him again.

_ He knew who and what he was again.  _

It didn’t bother him that most of the other heroes avoided him. Previously, before Parallax was driven from him, he might’ve lashed out in anger. But he understood that they were afraid of him. He could make that connection with them now.

Ollie was no different to him, but Ollie had been there through most of it.

_ Hal Jordan didn’t feel fear, but now he understood it. _

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a lot of my headcanons pushed into one thing, so I hope that you liked it. I'm also flexing my fingers in preparation for part of the Ineffable series I'm writing which is Barry/Hal! So if you're interested in that pairing, you should check it out! Thanks for reading and leave your thoughts below~!


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